"Any kind of popular trend is infinitely more wholesome than listening to old records. It's more important that people know that some kind of pleasure can be derived from things that are around them - rather than to catalogue more stuff - you can do that forever"----Harry Smith ^^^^^^^^^^ "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may / Old Time is still a-flying / And this same flower that smiles today/Tomorrow will be dying"---Robert Herrick

Thursday, August 15, 2013

not-so-New Age

So many operatives in the Zones of Alteration have moved away from hypnagogic 1.0 to hynagogic 2.0, i.e. high-definition / digital-NOW! aesthetics, otherwise known as vaporwave. Indeed they did
so a while back, following Ferraro's lead, such that there's already a
vaporwave-backlash! D Check this, that, and this: one-star and half-star reviews from Tiny Mix Tapes, until recently the great champion of all things V-wave. (Not forgetting its other great champion, our foremost taxonomist). Commencing the slide in its stock profile, this earlier TMT review - a tour de force of conceptual-reviewing - damned the genre with faint praise and fainter abuse.

But I expect VW will chunter on for a good while, as genres seem to do these days. The mystery of subcultural persistence (drum'n'bass is still being made in 2013) is now joined by the puzzle of micro-generic obstinacy: hauntology chunters on, even coughing up
twilight-era gems against the odds, while in postdubstep, "neon", first identified /christened circa
2009, appears to have cycled around into sudden renewed relevance, or so we are led to believe).

Another example: hypnagogic 1.0 has not gotten away either. Defying high-def, the blurry, lo-fi Nu-New Age sound of 2009-2010, which fetishised analogue from its synths to its cassette-tape format, is still percolating in certain quarters. As documented by this blog. And then there's this:

I Am The Center:
Private Issue New Age In America, 1950-1990

Light In The Attic

October 29th

press release:

"Forget everything you know, or think you know, about new age, a genre that has
become one of the defining musical-archaeological explorations of the past
decade.

I Am The Center: Private Issue New Age In America, 1950-1990 is the
first major anthology to survey the golden age of new age and reveal the
unbelievable truth about the genre.

For new age, at its best, is a reverberation of psychedelic music, and great by
any standard. This is analog, handmade music communicating soul and spirit,
often done on limited means and without commercial potential, self-published
and self-distributed. Before it became big business and devolved into the
spaced out elevator music we know and loathe today, this was the real thing.

From mathematical musical algorithms to airport murder mysteries to Henry
Mancini and Bugs Bunny, the connections to mainstream culture run in curious
directions. (Did you know, for instance, that a track from the first modern
private press new age album is featured on the Blade Runner soundtrack? It’s
called “Pompeii, 76 A.D.”, and we’ve got it here.)

I Am The Center is a knowing, but never cynical overview that invites
listeners at last to the mainspring of a misunderstood genre’s greatest lights.
Many of the biggest names are present — Iasos, inter-dimentional channeler of
“paradise music”; Laraaji, discovered by Brian Eno playing for spare change in
Washington Square Park; and the recently famous JD Emmanuel, icon to a new
generation of drone, ambient, noise musicians. Call it what you will — before
it was anything else, it was new age.

Lovingly conceived and lavishly presented, I Am The Center features
stunning paintings by the legendary visual artist Gilbert Williams, and liner
notes by producer Douglas Mcgowan, who weaves the words and images of the
wizards and sorceresses of new age into a prismatic portrait of music that can
finally be recognized for what it is: great American folk art."